[quote=@Isotope] [@GreivousKhan] Sure, though in lieu of handwavium maybe Cognition Engines brute force a sort of 'bridge' to see into the void. The Cognition Engine would then be needed immediately in order to stabilize the 'bridge' but due to the nature of machine learning only some of the time would the Engine arrive at an optimal solution before the bridge destabilizes and destroys it. Thus making Cognition Engines would be [i]very[/i] expensive as you'd have no guarantee you'd get any functional machines out of a given batch and each machine would be quite the investment just to lose the vast majority of them to chance. AI, being sapient, had a sort of affinity for the void that made the process far less dangerous. So a Vacare is just the far cheaper and less costly option. Those who manufacture Cognition Engines do so explicitly to avoid relying on Vacare and accept the random nature of the manufacturing process and the cost of losing so many expensive VI machines. Just a thought, mostly had because I couldn't think of a name for whatever unobtanium we would have needed haha. [/quote] One possibility is that Cognition Engines use literal, vat grown brains as part of their cognitioning. Perhaps cloning and vat-growing psychics to harvest their brains is the expensive bit? this seems sinister enough for the vibe [@Polybius] seems to be going for in this setting. And I always like gruesome.